"This is really something we never anticipated," said Will Flaherty, director of growth at SeatGeek. "The cheapest seat on SeatGeek right now is $8,000, but no site seems to have any inventory." Flaherty believes speculative buying is behind the spike. Ticket brokers frequently sell "air" to their customers, taking orders before they have tickets in hand. "We've noticed significantly more speculative selling activity than in recent years," Flaherty said. "Over the last few days, those sellers have been scrambling to buy up tickets to fill their orders, resulting in the Super Bowl ticket version of a short squeeze. Brokers with tickets in hand have been taking advantage of their leverage, raising prices dramatically and arbitrarily withholding some of their inventory."

Ety Rybak, co-founder of the high-end brokerage Inside Sports & Entertainment Group, has spent more than anticipated this time around to fulfill orders before the game. "I can tell you some ugly horror stories about what I have had to pay. But that’s part of the business," he said. "If I sold you tickets for $2,500, and I have to pay $7,500 to do it, unfortunately that’s the world that I chose to live in." The flip side to the high costs is a brisk business in late orders.

Maybe the US sugar cartel, among many other groups, could discover this approach to individual responsibility.

Nothing seems to obsess general managers (and fans) as much as the home run. And with the steroid era (maybe) in the past, there are a lot fewer of those out there to find. Which means that given the perhaps irrationally high demand and the declining supply, the price for them is going to go up. Which is a very good reason to be skeptical of deals for power hitters.

Unfortunately, the Diamondbacks just can't quite get over their sense that they need more power on the team. So they have made a deal to acquire Mark Trumbo from the Angels. To my eye, Trumbo is the reincarnation of former Diamondback Mark Reynolds -- 30-35 home runs, a batting average south of .250, and nearly 200 strikeouts a year. I wouldn't take this kind of player if you gave him to me. He is an inning killer who manages to hit one out of the park every five games or so. I suppose he is cheap in money terms (has a couple of years until free agency) but we traded two good players who had down years last year. In stock market terms, we are selling at the bottom and buying at the top.

The problem with [the theory that sports subsidies help the economy] is that there is scant evidence that such economic benefits actually occur. Numerous studies done over the last 25 years have found that professional sport teams have little, if any, positive effect on a city’s economy. Usually, a new team or a new stadium location doesn’t increase the amount of consumer spending, it merely shifts it away from other, already existing sources. Entertainment dollars will be spent one way or another whether a stadium exists or not. Plus, the increase in jobs is often modest at best — nowhere near enough to offset the millions invested in the projects.

It's amazing they got the local paper to print this. Most local papers would be defunct without a sports page. As a result, local newspapers generally bring to bear tremendous pressure in favor of subsidies to attract and keep new professional sports teams. Our local paper the AZ Republic tends credulously publish every crazy, stupid benefit study of sports teams on the road to promoting more local subsidies for them.

The various cities in the Phoenix metropolitan area have spent a fortune renovating ten spring training fields for 15 major league teams. I have seen a number like $500 million for the total, but this seems low as Scottsdale spent $100 million for just one complex and Glendale may have spent as much as $200 million for theirs. Never-the-less, its a lot of taxpayer money.

The primary subsidy, of course, is for major league teams that get lovely facilities that they use for about one month in twelve.

But these subsidies always get sold on their community impact. But that economic impact turns out to be really narrow. For in-town visitors, the economic impact is typically a wash, as money spent on going to sports games just substitutes for other local spending. But these stadiums are held up as great economic engines because they attract out of town visitors:

Cactus League baseball and year-round use of its ballparks and training facilities add an estimated $632 million to Arizona economy, according to a study released Monday by the Cactus League Baseball Association.

The study found that 56 percent of the 1.7 million fans attending games this past spring were out-of-state visitors and the median stay in metro Phoenix was 5.3 nights.

Spring training accounted for $422 million in economic impact in 2012, up 36 percent from the previous study in 2007. Both were done by FMR Associates of Tucson.

One of the flaws of such studies is they never, ever look at what the business displaces. For example, for local visitors, they never look at local spending sports customers might have made if they had not gone to the game. All spending on the sports-related businesses are treated as incremental. For out-of-town visitors, no one ever considers other visitors coming for non-sports reasons who are displaced (March was already, without all the baseball, the busiest hotel month in Phoenix) or considers that some of the visitors might have come to the area anyway.

However, let's for one moment of excessive credulity accept these numbers, and look at the out of town visitors. 56 percent of 1.7 million people times 5.3 nights divided by 2 people per room is 2.52 million room nights, or at $150 each a total of $378 million. So most of their spring training economic impact is hotel room nights. This by the way is the same logic that supports various public subsidies of local college bowl games.

Which begs the question, why are we spending upwards of a billion dollars in taxpayer money to subsidize sports teams and hotel chains? If the vast majority of the economic impact of these stadium investments is for hotels, why don't they pay for them, or split the cost with the teams?

PS- as an aside, it seems that to be successful in the corporate state, one needs ready access to consultants who will put absurdly high numbers on the positive impact of one's government subsidies. It's like money laundering, but with talking points. Take your self-serving spin, hand it with a bunch of money to a consultant, and out comes a laundered "study". In this case, the "study" architects are FMR Associates, which bills itself as specializing "in strategic research for the communications industry." The communications industry means "PR flacks". So they specialize in making your talking points sound like they have real research behind them. Probably a growing business in our corporate state.

I have argued many times that publicly-funded stadiums are a huge part of sports profits and team valuations. For example, here in Glendale AZ, the town's stadium subsidies represent over a third of the value of the Cardinals and almost 200% of the value of the Coyotes.

Public money for stadiums has become scarce, and I have to believe that's part of the owners' pleas for financial relief from players. Huge moneymaking buildings for free or cheap have been no small part of what makes owning a team a no-brainer. Now teams in need of stadiums -- like the Kings and whatever team may one day relocate to Seattle -- face tough economics. Getting either deal done requires some kind of miracle. And in that context, if you ever fantasized about a world where taxpayers didn't contribute so much to buildings -- even if it meant players earned a little less -- well, your time is now.

Glendale is throwing its support behind a regional bid to bring Super Bowl XLIX to the city in 2015.

In return for the prestige of hosting the National Football League game at University of Phoenix Stadium, Glendale must guarantee services such as public safety and sanitation for free and exempt game-day tickets from sales tax for the NFL.

When Glendale hosted its first Super Bowl in 2008, it saw $1.2 million boost in sales-tax revenue. But a city-commissioned study showed it cost the city $2.6 million in services.

The City Council on a 5-2 vote Tuesday approved the resolution. Councilwomen Joyce Clark and Norma Alvarez dissented.

Councilman Phil Lieberman asked for Glendale's cost to host the Super Bowl in 2015, but Deputy City Manager Cathy Gorham said she didn't want to speculate because "things change on a regular basis." The needs in 2015 may be much different from 2008, she said.

These guys are beyond parody. We lost money last time so lets do it again, and by the way lets be sure not to estimate our costs before we make this decision. Here is a bit more:

Clark said the NFL's demands grow more "invasive" every year.

Clark ticked off requirements such as use of the stadium for nearly two months, final cleaning of the stadium and equipment as needed for free. The NFL doesn't pay state or local levies such as payroll, sales, use and occupancy taxes.

Clark cited two former host cities, Arlington, Texas and Miami Gardens, Fla., which did not shoulder the costs of a Super Bowl. In both those cities, the states stepped in and reimbursed them, Clark said. She said that communities that hosted the NFL game didn't see "big spikes" in their tax revenues.

"The city of Glendale should not be expected to pay the Super Bowl's costs without recompense when it benefits the entire region," she said. "We are at a disadvantage because the NFL is hosting in our city."

Alvarez, an ardent opponent of using taxpayer money for professional sports, said the city was in no position to be spending money for the Super Bowl with the economic crisis. She said she couldn't face her constituents if she supported the resolution when there are unmet community needs and employees are still taking unpaid days off.

Note the only alternative suggested - the alternative is not "let's not do this, it makes no sense" but "let's make sure we stick the costs on a larger group of taxpayers.

The city of Glendale, Arizona (a 250,000 population suburb of Phoenix) continues to pour money into its NHL Hockey Team. The city has already spent $200 million on a stadium and is trying to find a legal way to hand $100 million to a private individual to buy the team and keep it in Glendale. But that is not even the end of it:

The Phoenix Coyotes are expected to stay in Glendale at least one more season, with or without a permanent owner, if the City Council pledges another $25 million to the National Hockey League.

Glendale this week paid $25 million it pledged the league a year ago in hopes of keeping the Coyotes in town until a permanent owner was found.

The city paid this year's $25 million from a utilities-repair account.

It's unclear whether that same fund would be used again and when the city would have to pay.

The NHL says the team and arena lost $37 million last season.

Just to give you a sense of scale, $25 million a year is larger than the city's fire department budget. It is over $100 for every man, woman, and child in the city, each of the last two years. Residents of the town are subsidizing a money-losing team mainly enjoyed, to the extent it has fans, by people outside of the city of Glendale. It is a $25 million city annual expenditure that mainly helps three or four bars and restaurants next to the facility. Just paying off those obviously politically connected retail owners a few hundred thousand each would be cheaper.

The importance of government largess to sports, including publicly-funded stadiums, has been a frequent topic on this blog. Recently, the CEO of the Fiesta Bowl John Junker was fired for a number of alleged violations related to campaign contributions and favors for politicians. This story is virtually inevitable.

The Fiesta Bowl benefits enormously from being one of the four BCS bowl games. In fact, the difference economically between being one of the four BCS bowl games and being one of the numerous other bowls is roughly the difference between the United States and, say, Peru. To give one a sense, the prize money for winning a BCS bowl is about $18 million. The prize money for all other bowl games varies from $325,000 to, at most, $4.25 million.

But the Fiesta Bowl would almost certainly not be one of the four BCS bowls were it not for the city of Glendale building a half billion dollar stadium to be shared by our NFL franchise and the Fiesta Bowl. It would almost be shocking if a few tens of thousands of dollars were not directed to politicians given the stakes on the table. And it should be no surprise that politicians in Glendale received many of the payments.

While Junker declined SI.com's request to be interviewed for this story, his lawyer, Stephen M. Dichter, could not resist issuing an e-mailed reminder that it was his client "who took the Fiesta Bowl from a postseason game created so [that] Frank Kush's ASU Sun Devils would have a game in which they could be showcased while they and the rest of the WAC were completely ignored by the national media to its present position as one of the four pillars of the Bowl Championship Series."

A critical battle is underway challenging the very heart of the professional sports economics model — and it is not the NFL labor negotiations. The unlikely fight is between a struggling league (the NHL), a suburb with delusions of grandeur (Glendale, Arizona), and a small, regional think tank (the Goldwater Institute). At stake is an important source of value for nearly every professional sports team: taxpayer subsidies....

Consider the Arizona Cardinals new football stadium in Glendale, for example. In part due to the promise of a Superbowl bid, the local taxpayers paid $346 million of the total $455 million cost of the facility — a building that will be used just three hours a day on ten days a year for its primary purpose. By contrast, in 2010 Forbes valued the Arizona Cardinals at $919 million, meaning well over a third of the franchise’s value accrues from the public subsidy of its retractable roof palace. It can be argued that much of the increase in player salaries and team owner wealth in the NFL over the last twenty years has come at the expense of taxpayers.

If anything, this example from the NFL understates the importance of public funding of stadiums. Why? Because of all the major sports leagues, the NFL gets the lowest percentage of its total revenues from its stadiums. Leagues like the NBA, and in particular the NHL, are far more dependent on stadium revenue for their well-being.

Let’s return to precocious Glendale. In 2003, the city agreed to publicly fund $180 million of the $220 million cost of building a new arena for the Phoenix Coyotes hockey team. Whereas Glendale’s subsidy of the Cardinals represented about a third of that franchise’s value, their $180 million subsidy of the Coyotes represents over 130% of the current $134 million value of the team. Stuck in Arizona and losing as much as $40 million a year, the team is literally worthless without ongoing public subsidies.

The column goes on to discuss yet another bond issue proposed by Glendale to subsidize these teams.

Several days ago, I wrote how our local paper, the Arizona Republic, was engaging in a coordinated campaign to get the city of Glendale to subsidize the private purchase of our professional hockey team with a $200 million bond issue. The logic of this is mainly to save the previous $180 million bond issue the city unwisely issued several years ago to build an arena for this same hockey time as well as the sweetheart commercial real estate deals it has cut adjacent to the stadium. All in all, the city proposes to spend a cumulative $380 million of public money to hold on to an asset valued by third parties at $ 116 million. And through all of this spending, taxpayers will end up with not a dime of equity in this asset.

At the time, I thought the campaign had been relentless, going on day after day with both editorials and news articles making cases to subsidize the team, and hammering the Goldwater Institute for actually questioning the legality of transaction. I mean God forbid anyone would actually interpret the Arizona Constitution "gift clause" that says governments in the state cannot give money to private businesses as potentially barring Glendale from giving money to a private investor so he can buy the hockey team.

But when I called the campaign relentless, little did I know it would continue day after day through the rest of the week. Every day we get a new article that is basically an editorial in disguise, with the opposing position, if included, down around paragraph 25. Today's is just a masterpiece of such yellow journalism, which includes no opposing viewpoint at all, and includes this classic gem that is almost a caricature of itself:

Rick Myers and his wife have worked as part-time ticket-takers since 2004, the year after Jobing.com Arena opened and they visited for the first time.

"This arena is not brick and mortar, ice and air-conditioning. This arena is a family," he said.

He said six months after getting a job with the team, when he had major surgery, his co-workers called, sent cards and offered help. The team also donates prizes each year for a Western Amputee Golf Association tournament that Kessel helps organize.

If the team leaves, he said, it affects "us little people."

John Minor, a guest services employee, said he counts friendships among the fans he meets at the arena, while Kyle Olson, director of arena events, said he's taught his toddler to howl like a coyote.

Can I barf now? Seriously, if you were doing a caricature of bad anecdotal arguments for a typical concentrated-benefits-diffuse-costs government program, could you do any better than this? We are talking about $200 freaking million dollars here.

Nowhere in any of its editorials or news articles acting as thinly veiled editorials does the AZ Republic reveal that it is an enormously interested party to the transaction. The Sports Section sells papers, and the presence of an additional major league franchise adds a hard to measure but most definite contribution to the paper's bottom line.

Postscript: The key issue that spurred this is that the city's bond issue is facing higher than expected interest costs. The city and the AZ Republic are trying to lay the blame on this on Goldwater for stirring up bad karma. But in fact there are at least six factors for why bond interest rates might be higher:

The major bond ratings agencies recently put the city of Glendale on a credit watch list

Sales tax revenues that pay for the bonds are way down in AZ and Glendale

The city is investing $200 million in a $116 million dollar asset without getting any equity

The city has a history of failed bond issues, as evidenced by the previous $180 bond issue they are trying to bail out with this one

There is a general sense of wariness nationwide in government finances being overdrawn that may be spilling over into the bond market

Incredibly, our paper has spend over a week harping on just one of these, which to my mind seems the most trivial.

Postscript #2: And by the way, this team is in bankruptcy. Where is the plan for how that will be avoided in the future? Won't we be in the same spot five years from now, just with twice as much bond debt?

Quick bleg here -- if you have any contacts with organizations of homeschoolers in AZ, could you drop me an email? Our small high school is, due to some random factors, short of baseball players. We have a well-coached program on a nice field and play in the Arizona (AIA) 2A league against public and private schools. Homeschoolers are eligible to play for us and we would love to find some dedicated players looking for this kind of experience. Many of our kids make the starting lineup as Freshmen, so there is a lot better chance of getting good playing time here vs. other larger high school programs. All positions are welcome but from a personal standpoint, since my son is first in the rotation, we could really use some pitchers so he doesn't need Tommy John surgery by the end of the year ;=)

Glenn Reynolds has a discussion of projectors as an alternative to flat screen TVs. I have been a projector owner through 10 years and 3 generations and am a big fan of them in certain applications.

I have an Epson 8500UB, which is close to the top of their line and can be bought under $2000 (which is amazing - the projector price drop in the last 10 years has been stunning). It is a 1080p projector with great blacks and color. I have it ceiling mounted with a 110-inch diagonal 16x9 Stewart screen. I have one of the silver fabrics (I think the Firehawk) that enhances black levels over the white fabrics (there is a reason movies used to be shown on the "silver screen.") The screen is acoustically perforated so the speakers (except for surrounds) are actually behind the screen (as in movie theaters).

In the evening, with the lights down and the projector adjusted correctly, the effects is awesome. Not to be missed. I have had to kick many visitors out of my house. Sports are also amazing, particularly in HDTV.

As Glenn's commenters mention, you have to be careful with light. I picked this Epson both because it is really about the best in its price range, but it also is very bright. Unlike my last generation projector, it can overcome some ambient light. I have to have blinds in my den, but with the blinds down but the room still lighted well I can watch sports on the bright setting quite well with this projector (you really don't want to watch a movie with this bright setting - movies are all about the blacks, and to get those looking great you need darkness).

Anything 60" and below, get an LCD. But if you really want a ridiculously large screen for movies and sports, this is the only way to go and I highly recommend the Epson line -- they have projectors at many price points and they are mostly all very good.

In the past, local governments and the legislature have blithely hit up taxpayers to pay for new sports stadiums for local teams. You may think you have it bad in your city with 4 major sports teams, but we have 4 major sports teams PLUS about seven or eight baseball spring training stadiums.

It seems like the legislature and local government finally got tired of putting all taxpayers on the hook for these stadiums, and had the radical idea that maybe actual, you know, fans who want to use the stadiums should pay for them. This turned out to be too expensive for ticket prices at the proposed new Cubs spring training facility -- fans aren't used to paying for the full price of their sporting event in their ticket price -- they are used to getting subsidized by non-sports fans. As a compromise, the legislature proposed a tax on tickets for all spring training games at all stadiums to pay for this one new field. This seems stupid to me, but it elicited this hilarious response from the baseball commissioner:

Selig told reporters at HoHoKam Park that it was a "dangerous precedent" to tax all ticket buyers primarily to benefit one team and that Major League Baseball has taken over negotiations for a new Cubs spring home.

Right, but it is A-OK if all taxpayers, including those who will never see a baseball game, are taxed to pay for the new stadium.

Back by popular demand is the annual Coyote Blog NCAA Bracket Challenge. Yes, I know that many of you are bracketed out, but for those of you who are self-employed and don't have an office pool to join or who just can't get enough of turning in brackets, this pool is offered as my public service.

Last year we had well over 100 entries, and we expect more this year. Everyone is welcome, so send the link to friends as well. There is no charge to join in and I have chosen a service with the absolutely least intrusive log-in (name, email, password only) and no spam. The only thing I ask is that, since my kids are participating, try to keep the team names and board chat fairly clean.

Special March Madness scoring bonus: If you correctly pick the underdog in any round (ie, the team with the higher number seed) to win, then you receive bonus points for that correct pick equal to the difference in the two team's seeds. So don't be afraid to go for the long-shots! The detailed rules are here.

Bracket entry appears to be open. Online bracket entry closes Thursday, March 19th at 12:20pm EDT. Be sure to get your brackets in early. Anyone can play "” the more the better. Each participant will be allows to submit up to two brackets.

"And when you look at the internet business, what's dangerous about it
is that people who are clearly unqualified get to disseminate their
piece to the masses. I respect the journalism industry, and the fact of
the matter is ...someone with no training should not be allowed to have
any kind of format whatsoever to disseminate to the masses to the level
which they can. They are not trained. Not experts."

Despite its wackiness, we can still draw some useful observations:

Yet again, we have an industry incumbent calling for some sort of professional licensing, nominally to protect consumers, but in actuality to protect the incumbent's position in the industry. Smith himself couldn't be more explicit about this:

"Therefore, there's a total disregard, a level of wrecklessness that
ends up being a domino effect. And the people who suffer are the common
viewers out there and, more importantly, those in the industry who
haven't been fortunate to get a radio or television deal and only rely
on the written word. And now they've been sabotaged. Not because of me.
Or like me. But because of the industry or the world has allowed the
average joe to resemble a professional without any credentials
whatsoever."

He can't even complete the sentence with the window dressing justification that this is for the consumers before he gets to the real people he is trying to protect, ie traditional media personalities like himself. You know, trained professionals. You could subsititute attorneys, doctors, nurses, real estate agents, funeral directors, massage therapists, hair braiders, fishing guides and any other licensed or unionized professional and find the same speech given somewhere at some time.

Note the implicit disdain for the consumer, or in this case, the viewer or reader. The unstated assumption is that the consumer is a total idiot, a dupe who mindlessly keeps tuning in to inferior news reports from untrained bloggers rather than watching pros like Stephen A. Smith as they should be

Finally, and this may be unfair because I am only partially familiar with Mr. Smith's work, but I will observe that he is an African-American who brings a kind of street style to his reporting. A style that I might guess that a crotchety sports reporter from thirty years ago might easily have defined then as unprofessional. Mr. Smith's career has benefited in part because he has differentiated himself with new style and approach, but now he wants to slam the door on others trying to similarly bring innovation and new approaches to the sports world. Unfortunately, all too typical of professionals of all stripes, particularly since the government has set the expectation over the last 100 years that it is open to using its coercive power to enforcing professional standards in even the most trivial of professions.

I end such a discussion, as always, with Milton Friedman:

The justification offered [for licensing] is always the same: to protect the consumer. However, the reason
is demonstrated by observing who lobbies at the state legislature for
the imposition or strengthening of licensure. The lobbyists are
invariably representatives of the occupation in question rather than of
the customers. True enough, plumbers presumably know better than anyone
else what their customers need to be protected against. However, it is
hard to regard altruistic concern for their customers as the primary
motive behind their determined efforts to get legal power to decide who
may be a plumber.

Unlike my question, the author considers coaches at any college, public or private. For example, my readers found that NY is probably an exception -- there are public employees paid higher than public university coaches. This article comes to the opposite conclusion, but only because they use Syracuse University, which is a private institution.

B-list? I guess I will accept that, as long as I can be in the same category as one of my favorite actresses, queen of the B-movies Sybil Danning. I am also consoled that just after Sports Illustrated called Mark O'Meara the "king of the B's", he proceeded to win two majors in the same year.

Yes, that's what I said. The pre-season college football rankings are absolutely the most important poll of the year, at least if you think your school has a chance to be #1 at the end of the year. That can't be right, you say -- surely a poll taken before anyone has played a game is the least important. Here is my reasoning:

In theory, voters in the college football polls each week come up with their current ranking of teams, which in theory could be very different from how they ranked things the previous week. In practice, however, voters start with their rankings of the previous week and then make adjustments up and down for individual teams based on that week's game results. The result is as I described in the comment thread of this post at the Sports Economist:

In effect, the college football rankings are a bit like a tennis ladder. Each
week, losers drop down 3-8 spots and all the winners and no-plays move up to
fill in the vacated spots. Sometimes a team will leapfrog another, but that is
rare and it is extremely rare to leapfrog more than 1 or 2 spots. In this sense, the
initial football poll is the most critical, since only those in the top 10-15
have any chance of moving up the ladder to #1.

In effect, the pre-season poll is the baseline off which all future polls start. I haven't done the research, but you could probably refine my statement in last sentence above to a set of rules such as:

A three-loss team can never win the championship

A two-loss team can win but only if they start in the top 5 of the pre-season poll

A one-loss team can win but only if they start in the top 15

An undefeated team can win even if they were left out of the initial top 25, but only if they play in a major conference. A minor conference team, even undefeated, will not ever end up #1 unless they started the season in the top 25.

Again, the numbers in these rules may not be exactly right, but I think they are directionally correct. This is what I call my theory of College Football Calvinism (the religion, not the cartoon character) since one's ultimate fate is in large part pre-ordained by the polls even before the season is born. So, if your alma mater has any shot at the title, you should hope your AD is out there in the summer lobbying the writers like hell to up their pre-season poll standings. Every spot you gain in the pre-season poll is one you don't have to win on the playing field.

Note to readers: This post is sticky through 12/15. There are new posts just below this one!

Welcome! This year we are in the blogs ranked 1000-1750, which to the un-initiated might seem like an also-ran category until you understand that last year we were in the "ranked 8751+" category, so this is a real step up! Anyway, if you are a regular reader, you can vote once a day here. For those new to the site, here is some of what I do here:

Welcome to the 125th edition of the Carnival of the Vanities. Many thanks to Silflay Hraka for starting the Carnival to showcase smaller blogs to a wider readership. Look for future Carnivals at these sites: